And had much stronger views about what should be done than and he thought that taft was just a little too much of a status quo guy. Yeah. Yes . Sometimes people think of the word pivotal as synonymous for the phrase turning point. Uhhuh. I was a little surprised you didnt mention that starting in 1932, democrats had a plurality or a majority in seven of the next nine president ial campaigns. Yeah. Starting in 1968, republicans had a plurality or a majority in five of the next six president ial campaigns. Uhhuh. And starting in 1992 democrats again had plurality or majority in five of the next six president ial campaigns. But thats not my question. My question really is, my question really is, is there something about substantial third Party Candidacies that exemplify pivotal election and should we expect this coming election will be pivotal only if there is a substantial thirdparty candidacy and probably not otherwise . Thats a thats a super question. I that is that is i hadnt thought about it in that way, but i think thats right. So third parties you know, richard hofstetter, a history professor of business, once said third parties are like bees. They sting and then they die. I think a Third Party Candidate or independent a third party figure can be somebody like George Wallace who is a candidate of one of the two major parties but is pushing the conversation in a different direction. When they gain traction, it usually is a reflection of the fact that the economic mood is theres economic instability. Theres change enough change that people feel that they really need Something Different than what theyre getting. And you also see this a bit in 2000 with ralph nader, one of the reasons they would say, gore and bush, theres no difference. Theyre just two guys. I think that i think george w. Bush showed everyone that he wasnt the same president as al gore. But there was this real kind of belief that you have these two kind of establishment parties and they werent really offering fresh solutions. But what these when these outsiders the sting of the bee, of the thirdparty bee, is they get these to the two major parties again, the durability of our modern party system is one of the reasons that its so durable is because it kind of accommodates the ross perot platform. You know, talking about the reduction of the national debt, for example. Talking about fiscal responsibility was something that ross perot got both bush and clinton. They had to talk about it more than they were talking about it before. So you do have i have to think more about this sort of correlation causality. Because i think there is something to that. When you are pivoting to a different political area, the parties themselves are finding a way, even after the election, to kind of accommodate the voters that were supporting this independent candidacy. Hi. Thanks for an engaging talk about a probably even more engaging book. I dont have the knowledge of my constitutional lawyer friend who asked a previous question. Follow up on that. Id ask you to use the crystal ball that you dont have. You did a very good job today of using history to understand the present. Now we will take you to the republican field of the 782 or however many people running. If you were forced to make a guess today its going to be a twoprong question. Who do you see at the end of this emerging as the republican candidate and why . If you have a why. Do you think if its not donald trump or ben carson, would either be encouraged by the support, that they might run based upon their support . And then the easier question, you spent so much time with the president ial candidates and president ial winners. Do you have a favorite or a nonfavorite or both . Thanks. Crystal ball, its always dangerous to have a history professor with a crystal ball. You know, i think theres patterns. My read is based on thinking about history. I would be very surprised if ben carson or donald trump ended up being the nominee. Now, in 1963, people would have been really surprised if Barry Goldwater had been the nominee. But i do think whoever is the republican nominee is going to be someone who has to accommodate some of the message, the use of media that some of these outsiders that have gotten all the attention have gotten. In the general, everyone runs to the center. Everyone is going of running for their base, but the primaries are going to be really interesting. I think what makes this crystal ball particularly cloudy this time and why the field has been so large is because of the nature of the campaign finance. If you have one very, very deep pocketed and enthusiastic contributor, you can launch a national campaign. I think another dimension is the cost of media is different. Donald trump has redefined free media, right . Now, thats been around for a while. Bill clinton in 1992 was very good at that. Going on the arsenio hall show, getting headlines for other sorts of things, but its a tough call. I would be surprised in part because theres been so much heat and light put on these candidates on the edges now. Thirdparty run, all bets are off. I dont know. People may promise that theyre not going to do it, but roosevelt promised he wasnt going to run either. Its hard to pick a favorite. What id really love theres so many great personalities, right . Theres a reason theres a big president ial history business. Its great stories, but what i really enjoy is kind of recovering and uncovering the stories of people who are misinterpreted by kind of conventional wisdom today. Herbert hoover is an example of that. And then other stories that really showcase their humanity. One of the things that i learned and one of the reasons i teach this as a history professor is because i worked here. One of the kids that come to washington every year to work in the executive branch or work on capitol hill. Even if youre young and a small person in this political machine, just being this close to law making gives you a very different perspective on power. You realize these are human beings. The presidency is on the job training. Theres no Presidency School you can go to, and it is extraordinary. Everyone is trying to do the best they can. We may disagree on how theyre doing or what they believe is the best, but it is a these are human beings, and they are ordinary men. And we hope there will be more women who join them in the coming years that are just trying to figure out how to run the largest, most powerful country on earth. And it is a daunting, daunting job. It amazes me that people wake up in the morning and say i could be president. I dont think im going to be running anytime soon. Its a big, big job. But to show their humanity and then to remind people they have this multidimensional life story with these phases in their careers. Everyone has their up years and their down years. Not a single president , even our two termers, even the ones that were the best of the best, they had moments where things were really, really going sideways for them, where their popularity was going boom. The spaghetti they were throwing on the wall was not sticking. Then eventually looking back over a long period of time, we have time to appreciate and get past partisan bias about what we think these people stood for and actually appreciate them as figures of history and as representatives of a moment in time. So thank you for your questions. Thank you all for coming. It was really great. Thanks. [ applause ] i will be upstairs. American history tv in primetime continues thursday with the people and events that shaped the civil war and reconstruction. At 8 00 p. M. Eastern, a look at shermans march through the carolinas. At 9 00 p. M. , lectures in history features the story of civil war veterans. At 9 55, examing john brown and the election of 1860. And at 11 30 p. M. , lectures in history on slavery, women, and the civil war. Thursday, the Atlantic Council hosts a discussion on russia under president vladimir putin. The panel looks at the relationship between president putin and the leader of chechnya. Thats live here on cspan 3. Thursday, book tv in primetime features books on education. At 8 00 p. M. , the battle for room 314. At 8 50 p. M. , the National Association of scholars report on reading lists for Incoming College freshman. At 10 20 p. M. , a panel for the tucson book festival on education. The need for horses on the farm began to decline radically in the 1930s. It was not until the 1930s that they figured out how to make a rubber tire big enough to fit on a tractor. And starting in the 1930s, the 1940s, you had an almost complete replacement of horses as the work animals on farms. I do believe in one of my books on horses i read that in the decade after world war ii we had Something Like a horse holocaust, that the horses were no longer needed, and we didnt get rid of them in a very pretty way. Sunday night on q a Robert Gordon discusses his book the rise and fall of american growth, which looks at the growth of the American Standard of living between 1870 and 1970 and questions its future. One thing that often interests people is the impact of superstorm sanidy on the eas coast in 2012. That wiped out the 20th century for many people. The elevators no longer worked in new york. The electricity stopped. You cant charge your cell phones. You couldnt pump gas into your car because it required electricity to pump the gas. So the power of electricity in the internal Combustion Engine to make modern life possible is something people take for granted. Sunday night on cspan 3. American history tv on cspan 3. This weekend on saturday afternoon at 2 00 eastern, law professor Jeffrey Rosen talks about the influence of former chief justice john marshall. Blossoming for the chicano movement. For the complete schedule, go to cspan. Org. On lectures in history, Dickinson College professor David Oconnell examines president ial legacies and what factors contribute to making a president ial term successful. He discusses several rankings of president s and compares the criteria and results. His class is about an hour and ten minutes. Four score and seven years ago our forefathers brought forth on to this continent a new nation conceived in libber tir and dedicated to proposition all men are created all kwaequal. The brilliance of those words wasnt necessarily recognized at the time. In fact, lincoln was not the featured speaker at gettysburg. It was actually edward evert, a senator from massachusetts, who spoke for two hours while lincoln waited until the end to give his closing words. Today, of course, we recognize the gettysburg address as perhaps the greatest moment of president ial speech in history. I think the fact that people didnt necessarily see the speech that way at the time that lincoln wasnt the featured speaker at gettysburg points to the fact that lincolns greatness wasnt necessarily recognized at the time in general. You have to remember that when lincoln became president , he hadnt served in Public Office for ten years. His Country Style of dress, his speaking mannerism, his selfeducation, all that was meant lincoln was looked upon with some degree of kond session from the eastern elite in the country. Perhaps not much was expected from his presidency. However, today, theres little dispute on lincolns greatness. I encourage my students to see Political Science not as a science but a debate. There are no laws, there are no findings, theres no discoveries. Instead, what you have who are people making argue ulments thay or may not be persuasive to you. Thats important to note when we think about president ial greatness. Were going to look at five different ways of measuring president ial greatness. What he will see these polls, these Academic Studies that involved hundreds of historians, political scientists and others, theres a consensus that lincoln was the greatest president. Today, we may have some concerns about some of the thing ez did. That he certainly took libber tis with the constitution. He suspended the right of habous corpus. He closed newspapers that were printing material critical of the union effort. He spent money that congress hadnt appropriated. The raised the size of the military without congress approva approval. Did he this for a great end. Preserving the union at a time of maximum peril for our country. He had the ee manse indication proclamati proclamation. He nerve lost sight of what the United States was fighting for. There was a lot of pressure in 1864 to call off the president ial election feeling you couldnt go through with an election at a time of war. Lincoln would be justified cancelling this contest. What lincoln said was what lincoln believed was that if the United States were do to do so, the rebellion would have won. What i want us to do today is think about president ial greatness. The whole class has been leading up to this point. We have been studying president ial power, leadership, trying to understand how president s are or are not able to overcome these obstacles in their way when they can successfully navigate the challenges and when they fail to navigate the challenges. The point of doing so is to become great achieve greatness. I want us to think about how we might understand president ial greatness, how we might conceptualize it. We will look at ways that different scholars have tried to rank the president s. From one to 44. And then were going to talk about why potentially today greatness is more difficult to achieve. We may never see another person like Abraham Lincoln. The modern president s, they have been weak. They have not achieved the level of greatness the people like lincoln have. We want to try to understand why that might be. And if there are reasons or if the fault really lies in the individuals who hold the office in recent terms. One thing we know is that americans love to rank things. I estimate that maybe 67 of the contest on the internet are lists of things. This is buzz feed. Its lists. Here are some interesting rankings that i recently came across in the hard work that have i been doing as a professor. The definitive list of stupid people on twitter, let me tell you, version 4. 0, better than 3. 0 and 2. 0. The internets 25 worst pass wortds. If your password is on the liver, its saying enough. Top 25 College Football teams ranked by stupidity of fans. A ranking of every big brother season from worst to lead worst. The 26 best drake meems that have exited. That is kind of cool. The definitive ranking of the 50 worst selfies. I looked at that one. The message is dont take selfies at funerals. Thats the takeaway point there. Americans also love ranking their president s. We have read the president ial power, the most famous book ever written on the presidency. A book that has been influential for scholars and president s alike. A guidebook of how to successfully exercise executive authority. Very first sentence of the book, the United States in the United States, we like to rate a president. We measure him as weak or strong and call what we are measuring his leadership. We do not wait until a man is dead. We rate him from the moment he takes office. Thats true. Gallop begin sur vagveying amers on obamas presidency the day after his inauguration. unh8 that rating, that starts immediately. Of course, there are all these benchmarks that are set in a presidency where we stop and consider their legacy. 100 daze, how does the president s first 100 days compare to Franklin Roosevelt. The reelection campaign, the ultimate opportunity for vote torz cast judgment on president ial performance. You have pundits and columnists who are asking how anything a president does affects their legacy. A way of saying how it affects their place in history. Even though we like do this, ranking the president s is actually really hard to do. So theres some systematic reasons why its difficult to try to rank president s. Its difficult to rate their performance. Number one, were not neutral observ observers. We all have our own opinions. We all have our own biases. That will affect hour we evaluate any president s performance. Research has shown that ideology play a role in assessments of president ial greatness. This does not come as a surprise to you. Conservatives of will think Ronald Reagan say great president. Liberals will think john kennedisy great president. The impact of our biases doesnt stop there. Its also going to impact the criteria we use to determine president ial greatness. What our standards are. Research has shown liberals are more likely than conservatives to think that Something Like idealism is a standard of president ial greatness. Those are two ways that our biases will affect our evaluation of greatness. We also know that context matters. President s take office at different times facing a different set of leadership challenges. Thats going to have to be taken into account when we try to rate their performance. On the one hand, we might give president s sympathy for taking office in difficult circumstances. If we think about barak obama, at the end of his presidency, we may want to step back and say, you know what . He took office at a time of a massive recession, with the United States engaged in two wars, and because of all these challenges, even if he didnt achieve quite as much as other president s, that he deserves to be rated higher because the context in which he served was more difficult. We know that voertz aters are c of doing this. At the time of his reelection, if voters considered obama and bush to be equally responsible for the countrys economic condition, then obama would have been nine points less popular. People seem to be willing to give president s leeway for necessarily have a lot do with. But difficulty is not necessarily a bad thing. Because crises, they can be opportunities for greatness. I dont think its a coincidence that the two greatest president s, we will see in the rankings, that the top three is always the same. Its some combination of lincoln, then washington and then roosevelt or roosevelt and washington. Its always the same. Two of the president s